Will our brains ever be uploaded into a computer? Will we live forever? Richard Jones, physicist at the University of Sheffield and author of Against Transhumanism, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about transhumanism--the effort to radically transform human existence via technology. Jones argues that the grandest visions of the potential of technology--uploading of brains and the ability to rearrange matter via nanotechnology are much more limited and unlikely than proponents of these technologies suggest. The conversation closes with the role of government in innovation and developing technology.
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Readings and Links related to this podcast episode
Related Readings
HIDE READINGS
This week's guest:
Soft Machines. Richard Jones's blog.
Richard Jones on Twitter.
This week's focus:
Against Transhumanism: The Delusion of Technological Transcendence, by Richard Jones. Softmachines.org, January 2016. PDF file.
Your Mind Will Not Be Uploaded, by Richard Jones. Softmachines.org, September 2014.
Additional ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
"Google's AI Just Cracked the Game That Supposedly No Computer Could Beat," by Mike Murphy. QZ.com, January 2016. AlphaGo.
History of thought underlying transhumanism, the Singularity:
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil at Amazon.com.
The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations, by Cory Doctorow at Amazon.com.
Hanson on the Technological Singularity. EconTalk. January 2011.
The Black Cloud, by Fred Hoyle. Wikipedia. 1957 science fiction novel exploring the deep wish to download knowledge to one's brain.
Marxism, by David L. Prychitko. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Karl Marx. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
"How Do You Explain Consciousness?," by David Chalmers.
A few more readings and background resources:
Moore's Law. Wikipedia.
Innovation, by Timothy Sandefur. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Human Connectome Project.
A few more EconTalk podcast episodes:Tabarrok on Innovation. EconTalk. December 2011.
Joel Mokyr on Growth, Innovation, and Stagnation. EconTalk. November 2013.
Gary Marcus on the Future of Artificial Intelligence and the Brain. EconTalk. December 2014.
Nick Bostrom on Superintelligence. EconTalk. December 2014.
David Mindell on Our Robots, Ourselves. EconTalk. November 2015.
Chris Anderson on Makers and Manufacturing. EconTalk. December 2012.
Boettke on Mises. EconTalk. December 2010. Socialist calculation debate intro.
Highlights
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0:33
Intro. [Recording date: March 17, 2016.] Russ: Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the first EconTalk episode. We've been going for 10 years now in counter time. I want to thank all the listeners who have been with us, particularly those from the beginning, those who have gone back to the beginning, and been patient with my interviewing skills as they have grown over the years. This will be episode number 523 [Correction: This will be episode number 519--Econlib Ed.] And my guest today will be Richard Jones.... He recently released an e-book, which is our topic of discussion for today. The title is Against Transhumanism. That book is available online without charge. We will link to it. Richard, welcome to EconTalk. Guest: Thanks. A pleasure. Russ: What is transhumanism? Guest: Well, transhumanism--it's a bunch of ideas, really that there are more than one definition of. But it's a bunch of ideas that really concern the idea that technology is accelerating so fast that it's going to change not only our way of life, but what it means to be a human. So, transhumanists are associated with ideas about technology leading to advanced artificial intelligence, about it leading to great advances in medical technology that will eventually mean the end of aging and death essentially. And technologies like nanotechnology conceived of in a very radical form that will essentially eliminate any kind of material scarcity. So it's a kind of belief package that comes together to think that technology is advancing so fast that it's going to solve these problems that humanity has been worrying about for some time; it's going to kind of create a new era in history: transhumanists talk about a singularity, which separates the knowable world that we live in now with some transcendent world in the future where everything has changed as a result of these accelerating technologies. Russ: It's an interesting week[?] to be talking about this; and these are issues that have come up on EconTalk a number of times, in a bunch of episodes. But this week, AlphaGo, which is a computer program to play the game of Go, beat the world champion Lee Sedol four matches to one. It's also a week that Moore's Law, some people are saying, is coming to an end. Or at least slowing down. Which would be a bleak forecast for the optimism of the transhumanist folk. Before we get into the details of whether the transhumanist vision is realistic or not, or whether it's a good thing: You tie the belief in the singularity and transhumanism to religious apocalyptic beliefs that go back to the Middle Ages. That's interesting. Why does it matter? And what's the connection? Guest: Well, it is interesting. The connection is actually pretty obvious when you read what transhumanists write; and in fact in some cases it's made pretty explicit. Certainly in Ray Kurzweil's work it is absolutely explicit. One of his famous books is called The Age of Spiritual Machines. So it's not surprising. So I think it taps into a long-held tradition in Western thought about this future that's coming along in which we have a kind of all-wise intelligence looking after us, all our material scarcity issues are solved, and all of that kind of bodily pains and [?] have gone away. So that's the background. People talk about the singularity as the 'rapture of the nerds,' Ken MacLeod's marvelous phrase. It's a marvelous phrase because it's very insulting but actually contains a real kernel of truth. If you trace back the history of thought, and I trace it back in the book in two directions: One, in one direction, through weirdly, [?] British Marxist scientists in the 1920s and 1930s and notably Desmond Bernal who kind of came from a Catholic background and sort of combined his Catholic upbringing with his Marxist convictions to plot out this future transformed world. That of course plays into I think what is widely thought in certain interpretations Marxism itself was a sort of secularization of religious traditions of Apocalypse. And there's also this interesting connection through the Russian Cosmists who emerged out of some [?] Russian Orthodox thinkers in the 19th century but actually informed the kind of futuristic thinking that underpinned, that the early pioneers of rockets and the Soviet space program. So, culturally it's fascinating. Does it matter? I think it does matter. Understanding the history of our ideas is important. Some ideas--just because these ideas have roots in a particular variety of Christian thinking, even a particular variety of Marxist thinking, doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong, but one needs to understand that these are not new ideas; people have thought them before; and it's not obvious that they are going to be any more right this time around than they were in the past. Russ: Well, Marxists often say that Marx was such a far-sighted that his predictions haven't come true yet. So, that could apply here. Maybe not. As you concede in the book, it doesn't mean that these predictions could not be true. I would just add, being a religious Jew myself, I have a lot of respect for religion; but I've found that when you tell non-traditionally religious people--that is, people who consider themselves atheists--that they have a religious component to their worldview, they don't take it very well. They get extremely insulted and don't like it. So I suspect that claim of yours, or point of yours, that parallel that you've pointed out, I assume people have reacted badly to that. Guest: It varies. In the past they have. I should say: I'm a vicar's son, too, so you know, it's a heritage I'm familiar with and respectful of. But I think the key point is that the things that drive some of that thinking--there is an element of wishful thinking, I think, particularly in some of apocalyptic strains of thought that run through. It's not just Western religion, but Western religion in particular for a long time. And I think if one doesn't recognize that strain of wishful thinking, one can be misled. Russ: Yep. I think it's healthy to keep that in mind all the time.
8:43
Russ: So, let's get to the more technical side. You say that the idea of transhumanism is associated with three technological advances that are perhaps accelerating. They are radical nanotechnology, radical extension of human lifetimes, and the inevitability of radically-improved artificial intelligence, or AI. How do these work together? And then we'll talk about why you are skeptical about, actually, each of them. Guest: Well, radical nanotechnology: The idea of radical nanotechnology, I think the best way of thinking about it, it's the proposition that one could digitalize the same way that--we're used to the idea that we've digitized music, we've digitized vision in the sense of films and suchlike. So, it's the idea that we can reduce the material world to software. Because if you can reduce the material world to software and you have some interface between the software and the external world--an assembler that can make things--essentially you can make anything. And you can go beyond that, because then you have kind of complete control over the material world, and in that way, incidentally, having abolished all forms of scarcity, then one can go on to intervene in biology at the most fundamental level and in that way overcome all the shortcomings of biology. Like, dying, for example. And you can also then create computers of the most immense power. Of course, it works the other way around. You need the power of advanced computing, if you like, to do all this stuff that you need to do to control the material world in such a way. So, these things are all mutually reinforced. And in the vision of transhumanists it's that mutual reinforcement of control of the material world, control of the biological world, control of the digital world that come together to create this kind of transcendent event that people the Singularity. Russ: And, to be--we're going to get into why you think the more radical visions that people are having about the potential of these technologies, why you are skeptical of them. But certainly we see--today, 2016--steps toward that. We see 3D-printed stuff that is very quickly becoming quite complicated an interesting. We see, as I mentioned earlier, a computer beating a human being in a game of Go that people thought might not be amenable to artificial intelligence. So many things that people said weren't going to happen. Things like various forms of facial recognition. They are making huge strides. So, the trends all look promising, don't they? Guest: Well, they do look promising. And in a sense what's annoying about transhumanism to me is that it sort of co-opts the actual achievements of technology, but that it uses them as evidence for these, what I think are actually fundamentally wish-fulfillment fantasies. The fact that the medicine advances is fantastic and to be encouraged. One is really pleased about the progress that is being made. One is also kind of daunted to some extent by the scale of the challenge. So, in medicine, there are many big challenges that remain unfulfilled as yet. In information technology, we've just lived through an extraordinary period in which Moore's Law held. That has been astonishing. Not totally unprecedented. But a vaster[?] piece of technological development that we've seen before; and that's been transformative. But all of these things have happened because, you know, the circumstances behind a particular technology came together. Much effort was put to make them happen. I guess what I worry about with transhumanism is, from looking at the existing technological breakthroughs that we are seeing, not really appreciating what it's taken to make those happen; and then assuming that technology is an autonomous force that will just continue and deliver this, this marvelous future--that's a thinker's kind of pernicious worry about it. So it's a--it is a funny thing, transhumanism, because it rests on correct observations about the power of technology to transform where we've got to now. But I think the conclusions it draws from that in terms of the direction, the direction and inevitability of future technology, I think they are pernicious. Russ: Well, let's start with--and I should mention, by the way, that Moore's Law is the--I'm reading now: "That the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately even two years." That is, that computing power per square centimeter seems to somehow, seemingly like a law, seemingly like a natural process, just improve continuously. And, as you point out, that may not continue. And--there's certainly nothing inevitable about it akin to, say, gravity. But let's move to nanotechnology, per se. Guest: Can I just stay with Moore's Law a moment, actually? Because I think it's really interesting, and really telling. Because it's talked about as a 'law.' Kurzweil generalizes it to say there's a general exponential law of accelerating everything. But Moore's Law--it's a very interesting thing. Because, it isn't a law. It's actually a social construct. It actually was quite an interesting social innovation that made Moore's Law happen. Moore's Law, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it's a way of organizing the actions of many innovation actors, you know, through software and hardware. It's a way of getting lots of people to work together to a kind of common external timetable, to make, to kind of fulfill the prophecy. So, in order to get those gains in computer power, those reductions in size of transistors, you know, many different companies, speciality chemicals, companies, equipment manufacturers, the people who are bringing it all together, semi-conductor companies like Intel--they all have to work in a coordinated way to this roadmap that actually underlies Moore's Law. So, Moore's Law is not a law at all. It's a social construction. Actually a very interesting and powerful social construction. And it is coming to an end. It's coming to an end partly because the physics is getting much more difficult. But actually as much as anything it's because the economics is getting much more difficult. Russ: Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. It's an emergent phenomenon that we've given a name to. Which may give it some impetus of its own. But no one is trying to fulfill Moore's Law. People are trying in general to "do better, make more money, express themselves"--all kinds of complicated things. And the result has been something we've given a name to, this social construct called Moore's Law. There's no reason to think it won't continue. But there is reason to believe that it could get better--that computing could get better, as long as incentives are there for that to happen. We could stop those incentives. They could stop on their own, through reasons like physics and other things we don't control. So, I think it's important to think about technology as an emergent process rather than a directed process. Although there are of course parts of it that are directed. Guest: Well, I think if you look at the international roadmap for semiconductors, actually that was--there was no central agency that created it but it's a rather instinct/social process. Rode down[?] this is the new, the technologies that have to be developed; these are the new materials that have to be developed; these are the new equipment, pieces of equipment, the [?] equipment, that sort of thing. It was actually quite a deliberate piece of coordinated action to get everything to come together to deliver Moore's Law. So I'm not sure I completely agree with you that it was entirely emergent. And it wasn't a single--you know, there was no single corporation-- Russ: It wasn't top down. That was all I meant by it. It wasn't directed, literally. Guest: Yeah. Russ: There may have been some coordination. There are many things that happen in the market that look coordinated that aren't coordinated. That are signals by prices and other things. This is a case, maybe it's a little bit of a mix. But as you point out, and as I mentioned earlier, it seems to be coming to an end.
18:11
Russ: Let's talk about--just stick with nanotechnology for another minute or two. It's a really beautiful idea that we could, maybe reorganize molecules or matter itself to do whatever we wanted. It's sort of a radical reimagining of the constraints of reality. Is there any evidence that that's going to be possible? And if not, or if not right now, why do you think it won't happen in the future? Guest: Well, there's a very good piece of evidence that at some level it is possible. But I think that piece of evidence has been misinterpreted by many people who are transhumanists. The evidence, is possible, that is biology does it. So, you know, if you've got a cow in the field, a cow in the field is a machine for taking bits of grass and converting them into rump steak. And that's quite a significant transformation. It's taking the atom's molecules for grass and it's rearranging them in very sophisticated ways to make some structure whose blueprint essentially is laid down through the genome of the animal. So, plants, animals, all of us--this is actually what we are doing. There is an element to which you would think the biology does constitute the software control over matter, in some restricted sense. Russ: It's undeniably true, right? Guest: That's right. Russ: A child grows up, is--that a child grows up or that a calf becomes a cow--forget the complicated part about the rump steak. Just growth in life--a tree coming from a seed is an absurd bit of magic. It's clearly a remarkable set of processes that lead that to happen. Guest: That's right. And so, looking, going down to the cell biology, you look at the ribosome--the ribosome is the molecular machine that reads the code of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), reads it from RNA (ribonucleic acid) in fact. And from the digital code on the RNA molecule that it reads, it converts that into a particular protein molecule. So that is genuinely an example of software-based construction of a atomically-precise product, a protein. So, that's a remarkable--it is astonishing and amazing and it's beautiful science that we've been able to find out how that works and what's going on in those processes. So, yes. So, cell biology is an existence proof at some level. That is some really rather special kind of radical nanotechnology is indeed possible. Russ: But you don't think it's going to happen. Beyond the biological. Or at least there's some limit to how we are able to mimic those biological processes. Guest: [?] is this. So, in the view of radical nanotechnology most associated with our [?], for example, the argument goes something like this: It's biology shows that you can do it. But biology deals in a kind of haphazard and random way. It uses, the kind of materials it uses, are pretty shoddy. I mean, proteins are not things that you'd want to build anything big or strong out of. So, the argument is that biology shows that it's possible; but biology does it kind of with poor materials. It's just constrained by, you know, the random way that evolution has taken place. As soon as we get some new Ph.D. from MIT on the job, they'll do much better: will use proper design principles, will use proper materials, and will get something that's much more powerful. And something that's much more powerful in the visions that are associated with our attraction, are basically things that look like mechanical engineering but are shrunk down to our scale. And so my argument is this--and I think it's an important one. And it's an argument that it's only been possible to make in the last 20 years; now we understand how biology works. Actually cell biology works the way it does because that's the right kind of technology for the nanoscale. Because the physics that takes place at the nanoscale is different. It feels, it looks different to the physics that we are used to intuitively at the macro scale. Things that to us look slightly strange--dependence on random motion, the dependence on things sticking together and unsticking, the dependence on molecules flexing, opening up, shutting down--you know, these things, they are not--they do it that way because it's a very effective way to do it on our scale. So, the kind of great classic picture of radical nanotechnology is this idea of grey goo--this idea that if we could make a replicator that would go around and replicate itself by munching the, you know, the food from the environment and converting it into more copies of itself, what we're describing there is essentially a bacteria. That's what a bacteria does. And I suppose the argument to the radical nanotechnologist is that bacteria, you know, we'd very rapidly be able to make a better bacteria than a bacteria is, because you know, we're clever and understand. So, yeah. But I think that fundamentally misunderstands how optimized bacteria are for that nanoscale world; how much more difficult it can be to do that--just by using inappropriate concepts that we've learned in macro-scale engineering. Russ: I can't help but be reminded by what's called in economics the socialist calculation debate--that a central planner could outperform markets because markets are just haphazard and they come together through prices but they are not designed to achieve anything. So if we were in charge and we had just--if the only challenge here, a big enough computer--which of course in the 1930s was not, was a pipedream. Now we have a big enough computer, in some sense. We have a much bigger computer-calculating power than we had then, but we still are no closer than we were then to being able to plan a 330-million- or a 7-billion-person economy, and achieve what is achieved through market processes. So, it's a--there's a certain messianic romanticism there, again, that is drawing on other traditions, it seems to me, in its appeal. Guest: I think you are exactly right. I would think that your parallel there is exact. There is a very close parallel behind the kinds of emergent processes that happen in a cell, where many things happen really determined by local interactions--the emergent combination of all those local interactions that produces the magic that is a metabolism. What people talk about in systems biology: these things are not actually--there isn't a central controller that's making them all work. It is this emergent process. And I think the analogy to a planned and unplanned economy is very apt.
26:03
Russ: But the part I found most interesting about the book was--maybe not the most but one of the most--was the discussion of whether we'll ever be able to upload a brain into a computer. And the argument there is that--I'm going to read the way you write about it in the book. You say,
... "uploading" a human consciousness to a computer--remains both a central aspiration of transhumanists, and a source of queasy fascination to the rest of us. The idea is that someone's mind is simply a computer programme, that in the future could be run on a much more powerful computer than a brain, just as one might run an old arcade game on a modern PC in emulation mode. "Mind uploading" has a clear appeal for people who wish to escape the constraints of our flesh and blood existence, notably the constraint of our inevitable mortality.
So, I've thought a lot about the fact that just even in the last 5 years, the ability to keep photographs and mindless musings through blogs that we have is quite extraordinary. A record of our lives is already being accumulated into the digital cloud. But that is nothing like what this vision is. This vision is really that my conscious mind would simply be acting like it does now, but instead of in a wet environment, as you phrase it, it would just be in a dry environment of a computer. You suggest that is not going to happen. What are the challenges? Guest: Well, I think--yeah. There are two questions. One is, do I think it's possible in principle? Do I think it's going to happen any time soon? Soon, being the next hundred years. I'm pretty confident that it won't happen in the next hundred years. I'm not--I don't think it's a very interesting-- Russ: Darn-- Guest: Yeah. Sure. There's an interesting point of principle. I think it rests--the idea that it might happen rests on some misunderstandings of how the brain works. And in particular how complicated the brain is. The big point I'd make is, one can look at extrapolations from Moore's Law indeed about how many transistors that you couldn't get in a computer; and it's very tempting to say, 'Well, okay, what's the unit of computation in a brain?' The usual suspect would be to look at how many neurons you've got, because we know that neurons are important in computation in the brain. But I think that's a kind of mistake. It assumes that the neuron is the basic unit of computing. And it's not. I think the most important point, I think, that there is in that chapter is that the use[?] of computing in biology is not a neuron. It's a molecule. The simplest life forms aren't doing a great deal of computing all the time. A bacteria--you think about a bacteria as simple and crude. But it is sensing its environment; it's doing calculations to incorporate the information it gets about its environment. And then it's responding to those calculations by changing its behavior or indeed changing its essence. Maybe not its essence, but its external form. So, when you understand that, then you realize that the scale of computation that is happening in your brain is just many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than the scale that we can conceive of in a synthetic system. That's my important point. And then there's a secondary point to point out: how one can simulate brains and the nature of simulation in complicated, multilevel systems. In a sense a counterargument to that would be, I know that what's going on in a computer is more complicated than just transistors, because the transistors themselves integrate the behavior of lots of electrons, so I could make an argument that actually a true simulation of what a computer is would actually involve looking at what the electron is doing, not just what the transistors are doing. Which again gives you many, many orders of magnitude of complexity. But the key difference there is there is a difference between a designed system and an evolved system. And that difference is this: A designed system, like a computer, has a kind of separation of levels. You can talk about a transistor as being an independent unit: you understand how it behaves without understanding what the electrons are doing, because we designed it that way. An evolved system, there's no kind of separation of levels of complexity that you can rely on, because the thing has evolved. No one has designed it, to make it easier to design the circuits. It's just evolved, from the simplest organisms that are still doing all this information processing up to complicated higher animals that are doing much more complicated kinds of information processing. So I think it's that misunderstanding that has given people false hope that we'd be able to reproduce a consciousness on the kind of time scales that are foreseeable given what we know now.
31:35
Russ: So, there's two parts to that. One, it seems to me, is--you say it's many, many orders of magnitude. And of course the answer to that is, 'Okay, so it will take longer.' So, really the question is whether there is some fundamental barrier. And it seems to me that you are closer to that issue when you talk about the evolved versus the designed. So, I can reverse--well, I can't, but someone can--reverse-engineer a device, a gadget, a design product. So, you can look at it, you take it apart; you see things you recognize. And you try to reproduce those. You may struggle. You may be missing some pieces of the technology that would allow you to create those pieces. But you can see them and recognize them. What's going on in the brain that makes that more of a challenge? Why is it I can't just take the brain of a person who has passed away, or an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), see what's going on, and say, 'Okay, we'll just get the computer to do that'? Guest: Well, that's a scale issue. Now we are talking about practicalities. MRI, it's a marvelous technique, but you know, its resolution is millimeters, usually, in [?] circumstances maybe tens of microns in the most extreme research environments. It's still orders of magnitude bigger than the scale of molecules. Russ: But if we had a better MRI, whatever that means, would understanding the molecular level of activity in the brain in theory, or in practice, give us a brain? Guest: Well, now--yes. Now we are going on from the practicalities: If we had a better MRI, it's in the category of-- Russ: If my grandmother could fly, she'd be an airplane. Guest: Exactly. So, you know, there are interesting technical reasons why it's difficult to make the resolution of an MRI a great deal smaller than it currently is. So, you know, this is all very technical issues. I think it is possible to get very high readouts of brains--fascinating work, this is idea of looking for the connectome, people trying to work out the connections of all the neurons in animal brains--fascinating, fascinating science. Downside of that is that it usually requires the creature to be dead in the first place, because the techniques are necessarily destructive. And then, as I say, there's still the question: the connectivity probably still isn't enough. It's the state of the molecules sitting in the synapses that are controlling the strength of interaction across synapses. So, I'm really just emphasizing--I'm not--in a sense, thought experiment is an interesting one but that's not the relevant question for what's going to happen in the next hundred years. Russ: I'm just going to read a quote here that relates to this from the book. You say the following:
One metaphor that is important is the idea that the brain has a "wiring diagram". The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others by thin fibres--the axons and dendrites--along which electrical signals pass. There's about 100,000 miles of axon in a brain, connecting at between a hundred to a thousand trillion synaptic connections. It's this pattern of connectivity between the neurons through the axons and dendrites that constitutes the "wiring diagram" of the brain. I'll argue below that knowing this "wiring diagram" is not yet a sufficient condition for simulating the operation of a brain--it must surely, however, be a necessary one.
So, that conveys some of the magnitude of the physical challenge. But again, give enough time, perhaps we could get at that. I guess--there is something really fascinating about the idea that if I could observe your brain in real time--which is not possible, remotely possible, now--and I knew the initial conditions, I could predict your actions and thoughts for the next, the rest of your life. And thereby raising this question, this classic question--essentially I'd be God; I'd be raising the question of free will: if I know what you are going to do, how much free will could you possibly have. You sidestep that, correctly I think, in a book of this length--it's only about 45, 46 pages, for those listening at home, it's very nice. But you are suggesting there is something more than just a physical challenge here. Is that correct, or not? Guest: Well, I think--yes. The question of free will, again, that's fascinating; that could take a long time. Again--many people who are much cleverer than me have thought about that in great detail. The only point I would make is just a physical one: that actually in principle we wouldn't be able to--even if we thought everything about the brain were reducible to where the molecules were, we would not be able to reproduce that into the future from knowing the initial conditions, because there's a fundamental randomness about the way that biological macro-molecules work. Russ: Yeah; that was my segue. Carry on. Guest: Yeah. So, it's fascinating to us where that randomness comes from. I think it's actually pretty fundamental. But, you know, there is no doubt: If I am setting up a computer simulation to simulate, at the molecular level, what's happening when a receptor molecule, when a messenger molecule hits a receptor molecule, the way I'd do that simulation would have randomness built in. Because that's the nature of the physics. I mean, to be technical, I'd be solving large dynamic[?] equations which have a random term in them, a noise term, which really arises from the Brownian motion from the bombardment of the molecule by the surrounding water molecules. So, that kind of randomness, it's a fundamental feature of the warm, wet nanoscale world, which is what our brains work in. Russ: But you do make the point at one place in the book that--is that--this is a philosophical question as much as a scientific one: is that randomness that we observe in that wet world, and in the world of physics generally, is that something fundamental or is that just a statement that we don't yet really, fully understand the physics? What are your thoughts on that? Guest: Well, I think it's fundamental at level that it comes from quantum mechanics. That much I am sure of. Of course, where the randomness in quantum mechanics comes from is something that I'm not sure of, because that's hotly debated. But you know, to the extent that we can tie it down to a particular bit of physics that produces randomness, it's the quantum mechanics that does it.
38:56
Russ: Now, you don't talk about this in the book, but it's something I keep thinking about and reading about, which is consciousness. Philosophers have recently been arguing--Nagle and Chalmers, most prominently--that our current understanding of the physical world does not allow us to account for the existent of consciousness--the feeling that our life is like a movie in some sense. The feeling that certain things are exhilarating. The feeling that we have memories that bother us or that excite us or thoughts of the future. That all of these, this complex inner world that we have is somehow not amenable to the standard science of biology. Have you thought about that at all? Do you know anything about that literature? Does it speak to you? Guest: I've thought about it. And you know, I wouldn't want to--I want to be very tentative in my response. And I refer to my own kind of, my own intellectual traditions as it were as a physicist. The kind of physics I do, the idea of emergent phenomena is very important, and I think very subtle and very deep. And I don't know whether it's going to give the answer. I am enormously comfortable about the idea that consciousness can be something that emerges from the microscopic description of, the microscopic physical description of what's going on, without--while still not in some sense being fully explained by that physical substrate. It's [?] I mean. But that's a long discussion. Russ: Yeah. You write the following. You say, "... if you are alive now," and by that "now" I think you mean by your vision in this book--"your mind will not be uploaded. What comforts does this leave for those fearing oblivion and the void, but reluctant to engage with the traditional consolations of religion and philosophy? Transhumanists have two cards left to play." What are those cards, and what do you think of them? Guest: I think--well, one of the cards are cryonics-- Russ: Yeah. Those cards are cryonics and radical life extensions. Since I finished your book about 30 minutes before the interview started, I'm probably more up on it than you are. I didn't want to surprise you there. Guest: Yeah. Well, cryonics, I think cryonics is this idea that one would be able to freeze oneself, and then at some later stage one has to hope that advanced civilization would find it worthwhile to revive you and repair any damage that's been done. You know--I don't know. It's not something that appeals to me. I think everything I've said about the state of the mind, the connectome not being sufficient, if you like, to reproduce the mind, the need to understand what the molecules, where the molecules are and what state they are in makes it quite difficult for me to think that process of freezing a brain--which is a physically very intrusive process--I find it very difficult to believe that the kind of randomness that that would impose on it wouldn't scramble up what kind of consciousness that one might have. And I guess I also--it depends on this idea that--well, two things are going to happen. One is that in the future we will have technologies that are much more advanced and able to unscramble without scrambling. And b). the idea that people would want to do it. I don't know. Neither of those things seems enormously convincing to me. Russ: 'Want to do it' meaning, in the future--that they'd want to unfreeze you and bring you back to life as a kindness or a Great, Great, Great Grandfather Richard, always wanted to see 2200. So, we'll just put him the microwave. Yeah. Might be cheap. Guest: Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. So, well, we'll see. Russ: It's the best way to do history: we find out what 2016 was really like. I'm kidding.
43:25
Russ: Let's turn to technology. Guest: Medical life extension. Russ: What? Yeah. Let's talk about that. Guest: Yeah. I think there--this is actually a point that, I think, you know, who can say they don't want to see all the difficult diseases of old age being cured? Of course everybody does. I certainly do. That there's a huge amount of suffering in the world from people who get diseases of old age. And we very much ought to be spending a great deal of effort trying to work out how to ameliorate that suffering. [More to come, 44:05]